My last year of RIT, my major was tasked with team projects. My team consisted of 6 people who, together, created a block breaker game that used a single wii remote aimed at two players holding two IR wands each.

The wands create an onscreen paddle that bounces a ball back and forth destroying blocks until a boss battle occurrs. Once the boss was defeated the season would change, along with the players avatars.

I took charge of designing and creating the characters and their 3D models as well as animating them. I also helped with the background design.

CYCLICAL SEASONS

Our game was created around a college wide event called Imagine RIT. Knowing that we would have hundreds of people coming, we wanted to make an experience that allowed a quick turn around yet still felt complete. We came around the idea of seasonal changes which would create defined sections of game that would each contain a beginning, middle, and end and yet would continue all day long.

Players would come in, play for a season, then leave. They experienced a portion of the game that felt whole but left room for further discovery. This allowed people to have semi-unique experiences. We had people play a season, leave, talk to friends and hear about alternate sessions which prompted them come back to see more.

SEASONAL CHARACTERS

As the seasons changed we wanted the avatars to as well. I created a unique variant of the avatar that would fit with each season. Originally, the characters would morph between seasons to show a type of progression, such as the plant character blooming into a flower character, then dry up into an earthen character, and finally freeze into an ice character in the winter.

In the end, we craeted characters that fit thematically yet abstractly into the environments, instead of the very concrete interpretations. Their proportions were inspired by Munny vinyls, which fit into the tactile feel we used for the backgrounds, creating a semi-stop motion miniature effect.

From left to right you can see the character for Fall, Winter, Summer, and Spring.

SETTING THE SCENE

Below are each of the season backgrounds. We photographed physical scenes and materials then compiled and painted over them in photoshop. Once each was set, we cut them up into 3 depth planes, foreground, middle, and background. The depth was used for paralax effects during gameplay to give some dynamism to the environments.